Faust Things First

Many things, including some audience members' hackles, are bound to rise when John Jesurun's Faust/How I Rose receives its New York unveiling as part of BAM's Next Wave Festival this fall, in a production by Mexico City's Teatro de Arena, staged by its artistic director, Martin Acosta. One performance (November 17) will be given entirely in Spanish, the rest in Englishbut that means John Jesurun's English, so get your right brains ready for linguistic dislocations, from German to Spanish and back via our own tongue, the likes of which you've never experienced. Unless, that is, you're familiar with Jesurun's other works, like Number Minus One, Deep Sleep, Shatterhand Massacree, and the East Village's favorite post-surrealist stage soap opera, Chang in a Void Moon.

Famous for fracturing space, time, and common sanity in his works as well as language, Jesurun once produced a piece that divided the audience literally as well as metaphorically: In Everything That Rises Must Converge, he sat cast members in two parallel rows, on opposite sides of a wall, facing two separate blocks of audience bleachers; the other half of the cast was visible on video monitors mounted above the wall. Not irrelevantly, the piece dealt with both teams trying to rescue a kidnapped translator (who showed up once, briefly, as a video image). Midway through the piece, the whole arrangement revolved, giving each half of the audience the other half of the live action. Such visual dislocations are certainly germane to the medieval tale of Faust, the elderly scholar who regains youth and power by selling his soul to the devil. Best known as the hero of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's sturm und drang epic drama, Faust has carried out his adventuresmost notably his seduction of the innocent peasant girl Gretchen or Margueriteand remorsefully faced his damnation through every form of theatrical art from grand opera to puppet play. Jesurun's rendition, of which New York got a preview taste several years ago when a Builders Association piece employed excerpts from it, smashes all the barriers, leaping from high tragedy to coarse put-down and from grandest archaism to lowest contemporary slang. Born to a bilingual family in the Southwest, and German-speaking from his adolescent years on a U.S. military base, Jesurun may be the perfect writer to play the devil with our everyday cultural parameters, livening up our isolationist notion of Eurocentric dead-white-guys art with a good dash of Mexican salsa roja.

And what shakes up the aesthetic consciousness, of course, shakes up political awareness as well. The phrase Faustian bargain, meaning an unholy deal like the one in which the title character trades his eternal soul for superhuman power, is a standard-issue item in political journalism, applicable to everything from nuclear deterrence to electoral redistricting. If Jung described modern humanity as "in search of a soul," Jesurun's games with language, time, and narrative, you might say, are being played over the void where that invisible object used to reside. In a world where dogged materialism and literal-mindedness seem to rule, he offers an escape hatch that comes without obligations to technology, machinery, or the ostensibly solid realities that, as political life has recently been teaching us, can vanish overnight if someone's in a mood to throw his power around. By the time Faust/How I Rose comes along, we'll know if we're in for four more years of devil's deals or not; either way, our souls are likely to need the liberating lunacy of his verbal dance.

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